Greenfoot boot camp ;)

Bootcamp…. Summer training camp for teachers on Java using Greenfoot.

All I can say is THANK YOU to @greenfootteam. It was a five day training course in the summer holidays. Crazy you might say for spending my holiday time on an intensive training course. I say “not really”. Learning to code by yourself is great but then having to teach it to others requires expert input. Or it certainly does for me. I want to be able to deliver the best and most accurate information to my students. Hence it was my time to be the student.

The Greenfoot team were incredibly patient with us teachers and asking what must has seemed ridiculous questions. Guiding us without giving us the answers. Which at the time was frustrating as I just want the answer not the path to figure it out myself ;) #Jedi training.

Greenfoot is a 2D games and simulation development environment using Java. This environment enable students of all ages (me) to see instant results based on my code. What went well as well as what errors – mainly missing semi-colons :) it certainly makes you look at your code carefully.

day 1 Simple intro to Greenfoot and getting things moving on the screen. {move(4) ; turn(5);} this isn’t a full method call but just to show you what the code contains.

day 2 if else statements, keyboard controls. Not doing to badly by the end of day 2.

day 3 Brain not functioning a full capacity…. Though I was up until 1:30am trying to get the atWorldEdge method to work…. I hadn’t imported the class it belonged to so that wasn’t going happen anyway…. Funny thinking back the time I spent trying to make “that” method work. In the end a cobbled together some code that did work but wasn’t scalable. Day 4 fixed my problem in the first 10 mins!!!! Ha ha.

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day 4 #hackday (build + teacher resources!) importing classes, superclasses, inheritance, image scaling. Plus demos of uses game controllers, sensors and raspberry PI. Very cool day. My rocket TPS is looking rather nice….for a Noobie.

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day 5 final 2 hours before presenting to the group! AAAAAHHHHH creating my own superclass to get my code to work how I wanted… I was(am) proud of myself , especially considering I actually understood what I was doing and why! Definitely upped my “chilli” rating. (one of the ways I level the tasks in my classroom).

I have expanded my knowledge and understanding solely because of this course. I can’t thank Michael Kölling and the Greenfoot team enough for this experience.

looking forward to the next one!

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